As you can see above, Floridian turned Brooklynite Holly Herrick knows a thing or two about flowers, but this is just where her expertise begins. The programmer of Sarasota’s quickly emerging film festival has taken up programming duties at the Hamptons Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. We spoke recently about why Agnes Varda’s new film shook her up, the new record from The Walkmen and why she’s looking forward to Examined Life so much. …Read more

“Narrative Jackass.” That’s the genre shorthand Micheal Tully has invented to describe Benny and Josh Safdie’s latest short film, There is Nothing You Can Do, and it’s pretty fitting.

The film was shot by Josh on a tiny prosumer video camera on a real-life, New York City bus crowded with both actors and unknowing actual riders. It stars Eleonore Hendricks from The Pleasure of Being Robbed as a young mother, and Benny Safdie as an irate businessman who complains that the noise coming Eleonore’s baby is distracting him from reading his newspaper. Various regular Safdie associates, including Ronald Bronstein, are planted around the bus, and when Benny starts harassing Eleonore, some of them rise to her defense.

The Safdies and crew pull off the street theater element so flawlessly that I’d love to see them turn this into a regular series––but not so regular that average New Yorkers start to recognize their troupe.

You can watch the short here.

• The Perfect Ratio isolates a heretofore unanalyzed aspect of The Wackness‘ appeal. “[Olivia] Thirby plays the indie-standard ideal female, what I like to call the “Quirky Aggressive”…Advice: Quirky Aggressives are only beloved in indie films. Please do not try to be one in real life…For the first few months your dude will be all like, “OMG, you’re so cool and funny! You’re not like other girls!” because you said something about giving “Nietzche a BlowJ” or some Quirky Aggressive-esque bullshit, but then after about six months the charm wears off…”
• “I like to watch movies in a theater, on a big screen. At worst, I like to watch them on television, on a smaller screen,” Michael Tully disclaims, before reviewing the latest offerings at YouTube’s Screening Room. “Having said all of this, perhaps I’m not the right person to write about [the Screening Room]. Or in a strange twist of logic, maybe this makes me the perfect person for the job!”
• Blah blah blah Inglorious Bastards, blah blah blah believe it when I see it and only care on a much colder day in hell than that.

• Reason number #379 to kick myself for not seeing Speed Racer in a theater: Daniel Kasman’s latest entry at The Auteurs. It begins like this: “Upon return from Cannes, I saw two movies in rapid succession. The films probably should not be combined into any sort of synthetic criticism, but it is too tempting to at least collide their names in the same piece: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) adaptation. The arena we are dealing with is dimensionality.”
• “The Happening is not just bad. It is more than awful.” At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully finds the dark side of Avante Retarde. “The painful truth is that I had a blast while watching the film–again, not in the intended manner–but when it ended, and especially when I woke up the next morning, my delight at the preposterousness of it all was gone and all that remained was frustration and anger.”
• Blatant self-promotion: Your Blogger and Glenn Kenny joined the House Next Door boys for an epic, booze-soaked podcast. This is just the first part; stay tuned for parts two and three, where I accidentally slap my wife while she’s winning an Oscar and then walk into the sea in order to allow her career to continue its ascent without the anchor of my humiliations.

Michael Tully, who interviewed Mister Lonely director Harmony Korine for the upcoming issue of FILMMAKER Magazine, points to Korine’s latest work for hire, a series of British TV commercials for Budweiser. There are four short clips, featuring two members of the Silver Jews, and they can all be watched at Bud’s UK website.

BUTTERKNIFE 7: Complicated Mazes

After the jump, you’ll find the final episode of Joe Swanberg’s webseries Butterknife, starring Mary Bronstein, Ronnie Bronstein and Craig Zobel (Great World of Sound). Above, you’ll find the penultimate episode, which premiered on butterknife.spout.com last week, but in the haze of SXSW, failed to make it to the blog. Also after the jump, you’ll find a full episode guide, with a bit of where-are-they-now info on Butterknife’s illustrious stars and guest stars. To comment on the episodes, check out the Butterknife discussion page at Spout.com.

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This episode of Butterknife co-stars Michael Tully, director of Silver Jew and Cocaine Angel, and Sean Prince Williams, the cinematographer of Frownland. You can go to Spout.com’s Butterknife page for more info on the series, to watch future episodes, to talk about the show, and to sign up for email updates.

Previous episodes:

Plastic Hassle
Sicilian Style

BUTTERKNIFE promo: Baker and Ross

Add to My Profile | More VideosIt’s that time again. Above, you’ll find the second-to-last in our series of Butterknife promo shorts, made by the cast and crew of Joe Swanberg’s new web series. This installment is the work of Frank Ross, whose films Hohokam and Quietly on By screened as part of IFC’s New Talkies festival last summer. This clip stars Ross and fellow Butterknife co-star Tony Baker, who has also appeared in each of Ross’ films to date. Take a look, and check back next Monday for the last of our Butterknife promos, directed by none other than Mary Bronstein. Here’s a clue about that one that might entice you: it stars a puppet version of Joe Swanberg. And don’t forget: Butterknife premieres on January 28, right here.

Previous Butterknife shorts:

Barlow Jacobs
Michael Tully

BUTTERKNIFE promo: Michael Tully

Add to My Profile | More Videos

We’ve been teasing for months, but now we have an official release date: Butterknife, Joe Swanberg’s latest web series, starring Ronnie and Mary Bronstein, will premiere on Spout on Monday, January 28. That’s four weeks from today, and on each Monday between then and now, we’ll have a new, special, Butterknife-related video here on SpoutBlog. Since it’s New Years Eve and you’re probably already halfway in the bottle, we’ll start the party with a re-run of Michael Tully’s contribution to the Butterknife promo canon, which originally premiered here. Check it out above, and check back next week for a new short directed by and starring Butterknife collaborator and Low and Behold writer/star Barlow Jacobs.

I’m so happy to introduce one of the coolest elements of our Butterknife promotional blitz: over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be introducing a series of short videos made by Butterknife cast members–who are all, of course, talented filmmakers in their own right–that are inspired by/formulated to spread the word about the web series. Our first video comes from Mr. Michael Tully, director of Cocaine Angel and Silver Jew. It’s embedded above.

We’ll be posting all Butterknife stuff here at SpoutBlog, but you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel, if subscribing to YouTube channels is a thing that you’re into. Oh, and on oft chance these video inspire you to make your own Butterknife-themed clip, upload it to YouTube and leave a link in the comments to this post.

And now, for your weekly Butterknife update. Joe Swanberg and friends are off shooting new episodes this week, but Joe sent along some stills to tide us over. Above, you’ll surely recognize the one and only Ronnie Bronstein; after the jump, you’ll find stills featuring guest stars Barlow Jacobs (writer/star of what was probably my favorite film at Sundance 2007, Low and Behold), and Michael Tully (director of Cocaine Angel and Silver Jew). Tomorrow, we’ll continue our  interview series with a conversation between Joe and Ronnie. And as always, you can and should check out the Butterknife page on Spout.

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Some of these links still date back to before the weekend. What can I say? It took a couple of days to make it all the way through my feeds. Only freshies tomorrow, I promise.

• John Brownlee offers a sneak peak at Ghostbusters 3, the videogame-only continuation of the saga, featuring a script by Dan Ackroyd and the voices of Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. “Will Ghostbusters 3 be a worthy successor to the franchise? It’s still too early to say, but early game footage of Ghostbusters 3 has leaked out, and it looks incredible.” That footage is embedded above. The footage has been removed from YouTube. Boooo.
• We’re sure Ronnie Bronstein is very excited about his Spirit Award nomination, but Frownland is also up for an award at the Gothams, the New York-centric film awards put on by Find Independent’s former parent company, IFP, which takes place tonight. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough already, Michael Tully has declared, “if Frownland doesn’t win the Gotham tonight I will eat my iPod.” Of course, we’d rather see Ronnie win, but should the iPod eating actually go down, I’ll try to get photo evidence.
• What’s this? High praise for Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, which was almost universally dismissed at the Rome Film Festival? Hmmm. Jurgen Fauth says: “I know, I know — there’s nothing duller than listening to other people’s dreams. And yet… the shared fantasy Coppola created from Mircea Eliade’s novella weaves a strange magic, mysterious, playful, philosophical, and loopy with romance. I’d like to hold on to that gossamer enchantment for just a little while longer, privately, before it’s time to take out the stainless steel critical apparatus and cut this one open.”
• Speaking of Coppola, The Playlist weighs in on FFC’s One From the Heart: “This neon, highly stylized break-up film might be a failed experiment, but man, is it one of the most pretty failures to look at ever.”
• Ray Pride passes along exciting news: David Cronenberg is writing a novel. Says Nicole Winstanley, the Penguin Editor who nabbed the rights, “I wrote David Cronenberg several months ago to inquire about whether or not he’d consider writing a novel. His films demonstrate a deep understanding of the human condition that could translate into fiction brilliantly.”
• “Noah Baumbach is one relentlessly bleak filmmaker, and that’s not a compliment,” writes Daniel Carlson at Pajiba. “It’s not that his films are necessarily evil, or even completely off-target; rather, one of the things that makes Baumbach so slippery is his habit of stumbling onto moments of slight emotional truth in the middle of a film completely devoid of it.”

• “Thank God for the strike,” says Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine. “There is just too much new content out there, and with the scribes picketing, we now have a chance to recover — to catch up.” Meanwhile,
  Nikki Finke reports that Jason Bateman is just one star who is refusing to promote an upcoming film by crossing picket lines to tape interviews. We think Micheal Bluth would have accidentally driven the stair car through the picket line.
• At Re:Sources, Pamela Cohn conducts a “case study in indie distribution” with Ben Niles, director of the documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and Jim Browne of Argot Pictures. Browne says that if you really want to book your self-produced film in theaters, you’ll have better luck if it’s a documentary: “Theaters aren’t willing to take a chance on narrative features that have no name actors in them. I see little indies all the time that are really strong, well-made movies, but they don’t have the cash to take out the kind of advertising you would need to drive audiences to the theater, or they don’t have any kind of recognizable talent.”
• Spout Maven Demndiary has posted reviews of Frownland, The Tracey Fragments, Grace is Gone and tons more from the Denver Film Festival.
• At Libertas, Dirty Harry says liberal polemics like Lions For Lambs are failing because blogs like his have pulled back the curtain and engendered mass distrust of the Hollywood system. Of course, they also spread negative buzz sight unseen from the moment the logline appears in Variety, but that’s just part of the process…
• On Day 10 of AFI Fest, Craig Kennedy calls In Search of a Midnight Kiss “the nicest surprise of the festival.”
• In the name of making a “dent on [his] December bills with money that I earned by expressing myself on this website,” Michael Tully is taking a Radioheadian approach to blogging.